Leverage Weekly #53 - Managing oversight
tl;dr - Oversight rekindles motivation and corrects misperceptions about skills
As I proposed last week, the many parts of an organization need to be fit to one another in the right ways. Since an organization is made of people and people differ, this means that many of the relations within an organization will need to be bespoke or finely-tuned, especially if you want to get the best performance from the organization as a whole. One place that this fine-tuning appears is in managing the degree of oversight you employ at different places within the organization.
The supposed danger of “micromanagement” is well-known. It’s common wisdom that you should “set your employees up to succeed and then get out of their way.” In practice, however, there isn’t a clear spectrum from “no oversight” to “maximum oversight,” and different cases often call for different answers. Micromanagement can be the path to victory (the Magnasanti SimCity video, an old Leverage favorite, conveys this spirit), but so can complete freedom, and all of the many possible unique configurations in between.
The formula, if there is one, is to understand (1) what the members of your organization want to do and what they don’t, (2) which things they can do and which they can’t, (3) which things they will learn by themselves to do and which they won’t, and (4) where each member’s beliefs differ from reality on all of those topics. A person needs oversight most when their beliefs about reality differ from reality in a way that won’t easily and naturally be corrected in the normal course of work. In other words, look at (4) and use (1)-(3) as inputs.
This may seem like a surprising answer. Typically, people believe that oversight is necessary when people don’t want to do something or don’t know how to do something. That is right in some cases, but the greatest productivity usually comes when people are doing things they want and have the ability to do. Oversight is needed when interventions are routinely called for. The degree and type of oversight depends on the frequency and type of the interventions needed. In many cases, intervention is not needed and, thus, oversight is not needed either.
When is oversight needed? Assume as a baseline that people have goals and skills, that they will act to achieve their goals and that they will succeed if they have the relevant skills. Under this assumption, many cases will not need interventions or oversight. If a person is supposed to do something that helps them achieve their goals, believes that doing that thing will help them achieve their goals, has all the necessary skills, and knows that they have all of the necessary skills, the answer is: get out of the way and let the person do the thing.
In some cases, oversight is necessary, however. The first type of case is motivational. A person may believe that a particular activity does not serve their goals, even though it does. In such cases, a simple explanation, namely, of how the activity serves their goals, can be enough. Of course, explanations sometimes don’t stick, though, and so oversight can be useful just for the purposes of reminding people. We use this at Leverage: “Remember, we need to write the Annual Report. We’re a non-profit and this is one way we maintain accountability to the public!”
A second type of case is skill-oriented. A person may believe that they can do an activity when they can’t or that they can’t do an activity when they can. Sometimes, misperceptions like this are easy to correct. Frequently, however, it is a difficult and fraught process. Learning can be hard and people often resist seeing their current limitations. When people are not clear on what they can and can’t do, oversight is frequently necessary. Oliver and I use this, for instance, when either of us might accidentally try to rederive the universe as part of some doing some normal task.
The ideas presented here may be very different from how people normally think about work, motivation, and management. Many people believe that oversight is about providing an external constraint to ensure that some intrinsically misaligned process behaves well. That perspective can certainly be helpful at times. But the absolute greatest productivity comes when people are set up to do what they want to do and are given the space to do it.
Oversight rekindles motivation and corrects misperceptions about skills.
Last week, I spent Monday and Tuesday at the Quantum Biology Institute lab in Los Angeles. We completed the interview process with a quantum physicist who specializes in optics and made an offer. The team also had a chance to learn a lot about the physics that underlies the project. To my great delight, I was able to get a clear understanding of “spin,” a quantum mechanical property like mass and charge, that determines how particles interact with magnetic fields.
While at the lab, I met with each of the team members individually. This was very productive and left me wondering about what the right level of oversight was with respect to me and the lab. Should I be there in person every day? Are quarterly visits enough? Too much oversight and I’ll just be getting in the way. Too little and things will go off the rails. This is just one of the many cases where fine-tuning an organization and the connections in the organization will make a substantial difference in overall productivity.
I returned back to the East Coast on Wednesday and took off Thursday as CTO for a work day on Sunday. This meant I only had a single regular day with the Leverage team during the week. Is that enough? Am I supplying enough oversight? A few weeks ago, we had a period of “surprising productivity” while I was away. Am I slowing things down by talking philosophy too much? Figuring out when to be present, when to be on call, and when to be out of reach is going to be important for me, the Leverage/Quantum Biology Institute interactions, and interactions with new partners going forward.
While I was away, Oliver continued work on recruiting for the Quantum Biology Institute while Melinda helped them with finalizing some of their documents and getting their Coinbase account up and running. Oliver gave comments on Dan’s draft of the case study on Stephen Gray’s identification of electrical repulsion and Melinda planned our Q2 retreat and made a game plan for posting some of our content from last quarter on YouTube. Very little oversight was needed and people were productive, which suggests that we’re getting the balance right at the moment.